Friday March 29 – Thursday April 4

Featured Film:

War and Peace at the SIFF Uptown

It’s a great week for long movies, as the Northwest Film Forum has the acclaimed two-part A Bread Factory, which looks pretty good, though I haven’t had a chance to see it, and SIFF has the new restoration of Sergei Bondarchuk’s legendary adaptation of War and Peace, which at just over seven hours, is almost four Bread Factories long. It’s a big movie in every sense of the word, not just running time: the cast of extras runs into the quintuple digits, the sets and costumes are spectacular, and it has more diversity of film technique than anything this side of Arnaud Desplechin. In terms of film epics, it ranks with the works of DW Griffith, Abel Gance, Sergei Eisenstein (Alexander Nevsky in particular) in ambition, while also basically inventing everything Terrence Malick did in The Thin Red Line and The New World. SIFF’s playing it in four parts, so you can stretch it out over a few days, or all at once on Sunday.